Bringing It All Back Home (21 page)

Offered a spot in Officer Candidate School on the basis of his test scores, Louis declined, opting instead to try to escape—he went absent without leave (AWOL). As he recalls, he
just took the bus into town, went across the state line to catch a plane to New York from Columbia, South Carolina. And then was totally freaked. Here I am, shaved head, the whole bit, figuring that any minute now they're just gonna cuff me and take me away. I was one of probably hundreds of thousands.

Finally, I stayed at a friend's house and basically wasn't home very much and was pretty much terrified whenever I was out in public and turned myself in about three weeks later. So I report back to [Fort] Polk [and] I missed my training cycle. They didn't even dock me for the time, actually; they were supposed to, but they didn't.

After additional training in Fort Lewis, Washington, he was sent as part of a complete company to join a battalion in Vietnam. Arrival, for Louis, was memorable.

Our welcome to Vietnam was a .30-caliber round. The guy was a good shot. We were glidepathing into Chu Lai, and this guy shot dead center right through the middle of the plane. Hit the pile of packs, luckily. Put a hole in somebody's canteen; that was about it.

Arriving in the first week of February 1968, he served with the Twenty-Third Infantry Division (Americal) until early February 1969. Thinking back, Louis recalls his attitude when he entered Vietnam:

The attitude was “Don't volunteer for anything and be as invisible as possible, for obvious reasons.”

When asked how he managed the rigors of combat duty, he replied:

Oh, God—well, I still sort of have a perspective that it really didn't have much effect on me, which I also know is bullshit. I'm sure you've heard this from everybody. You definitely just kind of numb out.

He tried to distance himself emotionally from what was going on. Still, he recalls his experience of Vietnam as a combination of 99 percent boredom and 1 percent sheer terror. On one occasion he recalls being attacked by American artillery, with big chunks of dirt falling on him while he and two others were on listening-post duty.

Body counts, used to measure progress against a stubborn and often invisible enemy, were, for Louis, a reflection of the chaotic and ultimately illegitimate nature of the war in Vietnam. In one incident, he recalls:

We're up on top of this ridge, full company, [and] down in the valley we spot some black pajamas walking on this trail, and everybody just lined up and started shooting. And I suppose that's when I found out that the CO's [commanding officer's] policy was “no prisoners.” Apparently, it had been from an experience—sending these guys back for interrogation and then running into them again. I was carrying a grenade launcher, so they were way out of my range. The guy next to me offered to let me shoot his rifle, and I said, “No, that's okay, no thanks.” And they sent a patrol down to see what had happened, and they found what they estimated to be an eight-year-old kid with a belly wound and just left him. I heard the CO on the radio call in three VC kills. I guess that was my first experience with what bullshit the body count stuff was.

Later that night, Louis again experienced friendly fire:

We
were on the other part of the ridge and setting up camp for the night, and there was this chopper circling around, circling around, circling around, and he circles around and he must have been up there for ten minutes. And he opens fire on us. Luckily, it didn't hurt anybody and probably got [him] into a little bit of hot water. [
Laughs.
] So another friendly-fire incident. [There were] lots of them. And that's just totally terrifying.

In retrospect, the war Louis experienced was already spinning out of control by 1968. These were very young men, trying to stay alive while making the best of a difficult situation. He recalls one incident that took place while his unit was stationed near Chu Lai:

It had been three weeks since we had a hot meal. I mean, generally when we were out in the field, they would fly us in a meal at least once a day. It was either lunch or dinner. They'd come out with containers and stuff, but it had been three weeks since that had happened. It had been three weeks since we had clean clothes, and it had been close to that since I had even washed, you know. [We had] fatigues that were white with dried sweat. Actually, we wore T-shirts more than anything.

So we decided to set up right there, and they flew us in food and clothes, they paid us, they brought us mail, you know, and we had been under, you know, an awful lot of stress. And we set up for the night, some people dug foxholes and set up claymore [mines] and trip wires and flares and the whole bit around the perimeter and stuff, but it was, I don't know—we let down our guard, let's put it that way.

I'd set up my little tent, and in the middle of the night all hell broke loose. I mean, there was firebombs from everywhere, trip wires were going off, explosions everywhere, and I remember crawling around on the ground trying to find my weapon, which I don't think I ever did. It's dark and then one of the guys from my squad off to my right was screaming he was hit or was blind or something. Actually, what had happened was he had opened fire and they fired back, and what happened was that sand got kicked up in his face, and it ended up he was all right, but at the time he couldn't see.

Somehow somebody pulled me over or somebody called me or something, and so I slipped down into this hole, and as I'm going down the hole, I'm going feetfirst, I'm going down this hole, there's this big flash of light in front of my face. I think probably this guy that's got sand in his eyes was there before me and after me came this gunner who was rather nervous. [
Laughs.
]

And so this guy goes, “I can't see, I can't see.” Well, I'm looking around and it's black and stuff and I'm feeling my chest and I'm feeling this dripping down my chest, you know, and I can't see a thing and this guy won't keep his mouth shut. All they had to do was throw a bomb or grenade down the hole and we all would have been dead, you know, so I'm trying to get him to shut up so they don't know where the hell we are. And anyway, all hell's breaking loose; you hear people screaming and explosions.

[The enemy] knew where everything was, they undoubtedly, you know, just sat around and watched us all day; knew where all the trip wires was; knew where all the defenses were and came up with a good plan to get around everything. We had three killed and thirty-nine wounded. Oh yeah, it was a bad night.

Louis freely admits that his antiwar position today has to do with what he saw in Vietnam.

A lot of guys come back with survivor's guilt. Friend of mine got wounded in an ambush, and his two best buddies lay on top of him to keep him from harm and they both were killed, so that's what he lives with. [I have] another friend who stepped on a mine and lost his leg and wonders how many people he took with him and stuff. I kind of figured out that mine is participatory guilt. I knew better; I shouldn't have been there, and somewhere along the line I should have just said no, I ain't doing this shit anymore. As I say, little My Lais happened every day.

As a student at Cornell University, he had gone down south to work for voters' rights. He learned a lot about the war and had participated in an antiwar demonstration in March 1967, where protesters marched from Central Park down to the United Nations. One year later, he was on the ground, fighting in Vietnam. He blames himself for not doing more to stop the war.

His return home was a classic New York story.

I landed at Kennedy. It's probably late evening, ten or eleven o'clock, something like that. Full-dress uniform, all the bells and whistles, all the ribbons, you know, everything, full-dress greens. Get my stuff, go out to the cab line, throw my stuff in the back, get in the cab, tell the cabdriver where I want to go. He says, “I ain't going.”

My parents lived in Flatbush in the middle of Brooklyn. East Thirteenth Street between J and K. He ain't going there at eleven o'clock at night, because he ain't picking up no fare there, you know; he wants to go to mid-Manhattan, you know, or at least somewhere where he's going to get a fare. So I'm a little more alert than I usually am. [
Laughs.
] I say, “I know the law; I'm sitting in your cab; you're going to take me.” He says, “I can sit here as long as you can.” I said, “I'll give you $10 over the meter.” He said, “Okay.” That's my hero's welcome.

Once he was back in New York, Louis contacted his childhood friend Bob Greene, who had returned from Vietnam just a few months before him.

He was there, and we spent, as I remember it, three days straight with a meal here and there and a little bit of sleep here and there, just trading stories … That was one of the tragedies of Vietnam vets, you know, not having any decompression … These guys in the Second World War came back on troop carriers, you know, they were at sea for a month or more, you know. With us, you know, one day in the jungle; the next day in civilization and—bye. So, happily, that was my debriefing, and we literally spent three days just trading stories.

Louis credits those days with Greene with allowing him to avoid some of the worst difficulties that many veterans experienced upon their return. It is tempting to speculate how other veterans would have fared if they had been fortunate enough to find that kind of relationship.

Apart from his relationship with Greene, Louis says he essentially stayed “in the closet” as a Vietnam vet until the 1980s.

In the early 1990s, Louis was participating in Buddhist meditation groups, and through one of them he met Claude AnShin Thomas, a Vietnam veteran and an ordained Buddhist. As part of his Buddhist practice, Thomas helps veterans understand the place that service in Vietnam should hold in their lives.

Louis became actively involved, traveling with Pastors for Peace in a 1993 caravan carrying humanitarian aid to El Salvador. He and seventy-five others drove thirty-four vehicles across Mexico into Central America to deliver supplies to the poor. A year and a half later, Louis participated in another Pastors for Peace aid caravan, this time to Cuba to help break the U.S. blockade of that country. As the first Gulf War began, he was a founding member of a chapter of Veterans for Peace in the Hudson River Valley, officially chartered in March 1991.

Retired now after a career as a union electrician, Louis has learned to speak out about his own experiences. He has put some distance between himself and the guilt he feels about what he saw and did in Vietnam. It has not been easy. Today, he speaks comfortably and effectively, often appearing as a spokesperson for Vets for Peace. The group has grown to more than 125 chapters nationwide and in Vietnam and continues its efforts to “abolish war as an instrument of national policy.”
5

In a 2006 interview with Louis about the global war on terror, posted on YouTube, he says,
It was like, Oh, man, they are doing this crap again. We cannot keep our mouths shut anymore.

He has this to say about the global war on terror and our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Like almost any war I can think of, with the exception of true wars of national liberation, our insanity is based on lies, no matter how you look at it. We are in there because a lot of corporations are making a lot of money and there are some crazy people way high up who believe that we should control the world.

He tells the interviewer:

These guys that are over there now … are losing their souls because of what they see and what they have to do. And it is criminal.
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10

BECOMING VETERANS: EDELMAN, GERMAN, AND PAS

In May 2005, at a small ceremony on a cold, blustery day, the former New York City mayor Edward I. Koch recalled the dedication twenty years earlier of the New York City Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the parade of twenty-five thousand Vietnam veterans across the Brooklyn Bridge and down New York City's famed Canyon of Heroes. Witnessed by an estimated one million people, the 1985 parade was led by the wheelchair-bound Long Island assemblyman John L. Behan; at the time, it was said to be the largest ticker-tape parade in the city's history. These events, Koch recalled, were a tipping point in the city's relationship with its Vietnam veterans. Ten years after the war ended, the veterans were finally, really, welcomed home.

The memorial at 55 Water Street in lower Manhattan is a wall of glass blocks inscribed with portions of eighty-three letters, poems, clips from
The New York Times
, and words from American presidents and other leading figures. The memorial and parade played an important part in the emergence of a community of Vietnam veterans in New York City. Vietnam veterans themselves kindled a new relationship with the city as they worked to change public perceptions and to help veterans in need.

The memorial and parade were also reactions to specific events. On January 30, 1981, New York City hosted a parade for the returning hostages who had been held in the American embassy in Iran. A reported 1,250 tons of confetti greeted them as they traveled the Canyon of Heroes. Amid all the hoopla, some Vietnam veterans became resentful. Bobby Muller, a Marine lieutenant who lost both legs in Vietnam in 1969, told
The New York Times
, “That's what probably would have been for us, if we had won.” He went on, “A lot of guys paid a heavy price, and for many of them there is no sense of appreciation or recognition of what they went through.”
1
The wish for a parade that would honor returned Vietnam veterans grew out of that experience.
2

The political needs of Mayor Koch mattered, too. A sergeant during World War II, he understood the significance of military service. He was also a divisive figure in New York City politics. Honoring New York City's veterans, many of them working-class white ethnics and a critical component of his political base, was both politically savvy and a matter of personal conscience.